Knowledge and failure are intricately connected, as the current culture wars and polarized discussions regarding climate change index. This volume initiates a new set of conversations in American Studies. It examines the nexus of knowledge and failure in U.S. cultural history with a focus on the present, where knowledge has become highly contested. Combining such approaches as Queer Studies, Black Studies, anti-colonial critique, Critical Digital Studies, and environmental humanities, the contributions to this volume explore both the ‘failure of knowledge,’ that is, moments in which knowledge is ignored, denied, challenged, or fails to elicit action, and ‘knowledges of failure,’ that is, the situated knowledges of those considered ‘failed’ in a given social order such as neoliberal capitalism or heteropatriarchy.

The volume collects the research results of the research network “The Failure of Knowledge – Knowledges of Failure,” which the German Research Foundation funded from February 2020 through January 2024. The collective expertise that is brought to bear on the nexus of failure and knowledge far surpasses the expertise that is contained in single-authored / co-authored monographs.

The theoretical rigor of the contributions makes it attractive to specialists in American Studies and the History of Knowledge, while the specific case studies appeal to students in American Studies, Queer Studies, Black Studies, and Media Studies.